Test Before Going Live: Avoid The Costs Of Mobile Application Failure

There is no doubt that mobile is one of the leaders in the technology arena. According to reports by GSMA, there are over 5 billion unique mobile subscribers worldwide. That’s comprises a staggering 80% of the world’s population. In the US alone, 71% of the total minutes spent online are dominated by mobile and this figure exceeds 90% in Indonesia. Yes, this indicates an overwhelming adoption of mobile technology, but what does this data mean for you? Well, it means that the proactive design, development and testing for mobile application performance is no longer an option, but a necessity.

What are the consequences of failing to properly engineer for performance in mobile application deployment? Without accurately predicting how applications and network services will perform for your end users before going live, some portion of your deployment will fail. That’s a guarantee. Despite this ugly truth, however, it seems as if very few companies are prepared to establish, validate, and predict mobile application performance.

How could failure impact your business costs? There are a variety of factors that influence the business cost of a poorly performing application undermining expectations. You need to consider two types of costs – remediation costs and business costs. Calculating remediation cost is easy; you just need to understand how many resources are required to troubleshoot and resolve problems, how long it takes those resources to resolve a problem, and what is the hourly cost of those resources. With this information, you begin to understand how much a failure costs.

You also need to take into consideration how the application affects your business and end users. How does company brand relate to the app? What is the impact of bad reviews? Good reviews? The Android market and the Apple AppStore offer immediate feedback – positive and negative. These reviews can – and do – make or break an application’s success. You also must ask yourself: how do performance degradations affect revenue? How do you quantify productivity losses? Consider these two calculations of productivity loss:

“Productivity loss due to application performance issues is estimated at a loss of $42,000 per hour for each user group impacted.” (IT Management News)

“The loss associated with IT issues has been quantified as a 63% reduction in productivity, “resulting in an average of 552 people hours lost per year per company.” (CA Technologies, 2011 survey of 1,800 companies)

How does your company’s cost of failure compare? How many post-deployment performance issues can be avoided? What does it cost your business to lose a customer? What does it cost to retain them? What is the lifetime customer value? What does it cost to acquire a new customer? Answering these critical questions could be the key to unlocking the true cost of failure for your mobile application.